Posted
by
samzenpus
on Friday March 04, 2011 @03:40PM
from the robot-gorillas-to-hunt-the-robot-cats dept.

cylonlover writes "Robots are faster than humans at a lot of things, but up until now running hasn't been one of them. That is set to change with robotics company Boston Dynamics recently awarded a contract by DARPA to design and build a quadraped CHEETAH robot that is faster than any human. The contract also includes the creation of an agile, bipedal humanoid robot. It's hard to say which one might ultimately be creepier."

Law 1: A robot must protect its own existence.
Law 2: A robot must obey any orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
Law 3: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm long as it does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Or did I get those flipped around? Either way, I think this will lead to a wonderful Robot Cheetah, Human relationship.

Law 0: A Robot may not take any action which may result in the manufacturer being held liable.

Also, in practice, law 2 (Or 3, in Asimov's numbering) would have to be modified to accept orders only from authorised people. Otherwise the robot would be just too easy to abuse. Picture some kids going to a fire station and shouting 'spray anyone who passes by with the hose!' Chaos ensues until someone thinks to countermand the instruction.

Those three little rules are awful vague. Seems like you'd almost have to be omnipotent to be able to full weigh them. And we all know the kinds of problems that can lead to. I mean, a little ol' lady with Alzheimer's wandering around in a construction site is a lot different than a teen skateboarder shredding in the park.

Yes I see. The robot is not going to have any chance of understanding that the latter is much funnier when they fall down...

I grew up as a technophile, always seeing the good in new technology which could never come fast enough for me. I'd listen to the older generations bemoan how things were changing too fast, and in ways that weren't necessarily benefiting humanity. I would scoff, laugh or argue - most of these people seemed to be either of an age when the mind starts not keeping up with changes, or not technically adept in the first place.

Over the last few years, I started worrying about things changing too fast and in way

I think you are beginning to realize that what you formerly considered an attitude of those growing old was in fact an attitude of those growing up. As we grow up our attitudes that are somewhat based on textbooks and storybooks are modified by real world experiences. Now this is often domain specific, its not an overall understanding.

For example a hobby of mine is SCUBA diving. In the "old days" divers used mechanical analog gauges indicating depth and tank pressure, and a watch and a plastic card wit

I think the electrical engineers and computer programmers have a lot of experience with technology failing, and have seen first hand how a tiny, seemingly insignificant detail, or slight deviation from expected, have caused things to fail horribly time and time again.

So, it's only natural that they're much more wary for new tech, especially when it can directly affect their own life.

I think the electrical engineers and computer programmers have a lot of experience with technology failing, and have seen first hand how a tiny, seemingly insignificant detail, or slight deviation from expected, have caused things to fail horribly time and time again. So, it's only natural that they're much more wary for new tech, especially when it can directly affect their own life.

Yes, but I think its more general than that. As a person develops more experience in a given domain they give more consideration to what can go wrong, and/or have a better understanding of the value added (as opposed to what the sales/marketing people are saying).

I have a strange suspicion this DARPA robot isn't going to have Asimov's laws integrated into it...

Terminator, Transformers,... these are the wrong movies. Try Red Planet and the AMEE robot. Given the following snippet I bet you can guess what happens next. Hint: Asimov would not approve.

"The landing craft is damaged entering the Martian atmosphere, veers off course, and crash-lands far from their landing zone near the habitat. In the process, they lose track of "AMEE", a military combat robot re-purposed to serve as their "Mars surface navigator"..."http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Planet_(film) [wikipedia.org]

Give me a dirt bike and I'll go faster than you almost anyplace you can go on foot -- the only exception is up a tree. Of course, if they train this robot to climb trees, then we're all well and truly fucked!

Of course, a dirt bike actually consists of 2 wheels occasionally aided by an outrigger leg on each side...

Obviously the war in Afghanistan is the primary driving force behind these quad legged robotics. Think of them as land-drones with mounted Metal Storm rounds and night vision (or something). Their roles can act as mules caring munitions, or playing the Hunter Killer. They're the perfect vehicle for breaking the stalemate in an exchange of fire suppression. No need to worry about splash damage from an aerial attack.

Yeah mainly legs are useful at grasping branches and outcroppings, etc. Climbing is really where arms and legs shine over wheels. I think a combination of the two will come to fruition, legs with wheels that can be braked for use as feet.

Will it outrun a human on the open savannah or through an urban city? I know the TFA mentioned tight turns and immediate stop & go, but what about in a building, over a fence, through the neighbor's back yard, up the stairs, from one roof to the next? I'd really like to watch something like this outrun an urban freerunner.

One step at a time, I doubt many of us slashdotters could catch an urban freerunner. Give the technology a little time to grow, I am sure that once the tech as matured there will be many such uses for walking machines.

"They set a Slamhound on Turner's trail in New Delhi, slotted it to his pheromones and the color of his hair. It caught up with him on a street called Chandni Chauk and came scrambling for his rented BMW through a forest of bare brown legs and pedicab tires. Its core was a kilogram of recrystallized hexogene and flaked TNT.

He didn't see it coming. The last he saw of India was the pink stucco façade of a place called the Khush-Oil Hotel. "

Big Dog is impressive but slow. Equating big dog to a cheetah is like equating a Mac truck to a Ferrari; they are very different technologies. The main issue will be weight to power. How to build actuators fast and powerful enough for the required speed without making them too heavy. The power source and energy reserve have the same issue.

My impression of BigDog was that it moved at a brisk walking pace - the recovery from being kicked sideways said to me that it could at least move its legs pretty fast - "faster than a human can run" is only about 2-3 times that speed (~15-20 mph). The removal of a payload-carrying requirement most likely allows for significant weight savings in the structural parts, too, and ICE is a pretty weight-efficient power source.

From the Boston Dynamics web site the top speed of Big Dog is 4mph. Maximum human sprint speed is 27.79 mph which is almost 7 times the current speed of Big Dog. A cheetah does 62 mph which is over 15 times the current speed of Big Dog.

Don't you think they already move the Big Dog as fast as they can with current technology? Why would they go artificially slow?

When acceleration and directional change (remember there are no wheels) is considered the power required will me much more than what Big Dog produces

You have a point, but I set the bar of "as fast as any human" a little lower - this thing doesn't tire, so speed over distance is acceptable. World record in the mile is 3:43, which is roughly 16 mph, four times the speed of the BigDog.

BigDog also has a 340-pound payload capacity; remove that requirement and you have both room for a more powerful engine and weight savings in the structure, hydraulics, and joints.

"The CHEETAH robot will reportedly have four legs, a flexible spine, an articulated head/neck, and perhaps a tail. It will be able to run faster than any existing legged robot or human runner, make tight, zig-zagging turns in order to chase or evade, be able to accelerate very rapidly from a standstill, and stop just as quickly."

Sorry but Big Dog does not meet any of these requirements; it is a truck not a sports car. It looks like the design is targeted at chasing down a

So, is it ever OK to ask just how much autonomy we want to give to cybernetics? Or should we just rush ahead with successive generations of robots and AI with no concern for what happens if a computer does achieve intelligence.

Sci fi has conditioned us to place a tin foil hat squarely on anyone who would even ask such a question. It is a big world and a skynet type of situation isn't all that far fetched now. Yes, so far robotics seems pretty much the province of tinkerers but we haven't seen any new

The roboticists will have a real milestone when they make one that can outrun a real Cheetah, and maneuverable enough to catch a Thompson's Gazelle. When it catches the gazelle, it has to do it as quickly as a cheetah. No fair just wearing it down by having more stamina. (Okay, building a robot to chase down gazelles might be cruelty to animals, something I'm against. My point is to put the achievement in perspective. Building any robot on legs that can outrun a human is an achievement, I admit. I'm j

As part of Mr. Lee's good neighbor policy, all Rat Things are programmed never to break the sound barrier in a populated area. But Fido's in too much of a hurry to worry about the good neighbor policy.
Jack the sound barrier. Bring the noise.

It's a neat benchmark of our progress in robotics but humans have never been fast runners. Our advantage is that we can maintain a decent pace for extended periods of time. Many animals which are much faster sprinters would completely fail to keep up with humans over large distances. So while I'm impressed, it's more of a neat fact than a major milestone.

"It made a single last leap into the air coming down at Montag from a good three feet over his head, its spidered legs reaching, the procaine needle snapping out its single angry tooth. Montag caught it with a bloom of fire, a single wondrous blossom that curled in petals of yellow and blue and orange about the metal dog, clad it in a new covering as it slammed into Montag and threw him ban feet back against the bole of a tree, taking the flame gun with him."

1. The basic design of wheeled vehicles is already sewn up, with continued incremental advances being made in response to private sector requirements. No need for DARPA to care about the field. If they want a wheeled chassis, they'll just send somebody down to the dealership(this is, in fact, pretty much how their autonomous navigation challenge goes: everybody plunks their novel sensor/navigation package on top of a commercial vehicle body).

Or in a more PR-friendly varient of 2.... victim location after natural disaster. Dogs are used for that already, and do a decent job, but a robot of similar physical ability could roam further and faster without the need to stay close to it's handler. Just needs to maintain a radio link. Operator steers it with a joystick, and the robot itsself decides where to put each limb.

Once I was walking in the mountains, traversing a very wide draw. I saw an ibex sprint all the way across that draw in seconds. It took me fifteen or twenty minutes to get to the other side of the draw. I was constrained by my slow speed and my need to stay on the trail; the ibex wasn't.

A mechanized cheetah could be much faster than a wheeled vehicle travelling over irregular terrain. The cheetah can leap over terrain obstacles that a wheeled vehicle must negotiate.

While I can acknowledge cool engineering when I see it, we discovered millennia ago that the wheel is better when designing mobile tools. Why do robotics researchers keep going back to animal shapes? This might be faster than a human, but that doesn't mean much. I guarantee it isn't faster, more efficient, or more practical than an AI-controlled motorcycle or trike.

There is a major flaw in your logic. You are not considering that the tools we make are constrained by our technical proficiency. Wheels are our best option because they are of a sufficiently low technology that we can make them. As for practical they are not, hence the need for use to build roads or lay tracks all over the planet. Roads and tracks being another sufficiently low technology. For true practicality you have to look at what nature developed to navigate natural terrain.

Hi, roboticist here. Let me just say 'citation needed' to pretty much everything the parent said. I'm not quite sure what a "sense of instability and correction mechanisms" is, but I'm guessing they mean "sensors and control systems", but I'm pretty sure dynamic stability, traction, motion sensing and control have little to do with conformal surface coverings. Yes, skin has important traction characteristics, and flesh has inherent compliance that is important in gait cycles, but skin has nothing to do with dynamic stability.

Further more, it is fallacious to say that researchers aren't developing skin. That's simply false - there are many benefits to synthetic skin to be derived from users of prosthetic appliances, both in contact mechanics and sensing. There have been some very novel products in that area... they just don't happen to apply to dynamic control of legged robots.

Given the parent's mention of Big Dog and the weight of mechanical structures, I'd like to point out that part of the work for cheetah includes exploring composite structures for legged robots that will decrease total weight and rotational inertia of the limbs - directly related to the maximum speed at which a legged robot can move. Cf. the sexy MIT cheetah pic here [mit.edu]. Note the call-outs citing sensors, balance mechanisms, traction control, actuators and distinct lack of skin.

Fellow roboticist here: regarding your statement "There have been some very novel products in [synthetic skin]... they just don't happen to apply to dynamic control of legged robots."

I was recently demoing a robot at one of the RCTA meetings @ GDRS and one of the presenters was showing slides on their work using an artificial skin on the "feet" of legged robots to sense and distinguish terrain types. They had some interesting force graphs demonstrating that they could differentiate between sand, straw, a

Skin doesn't contribute to locomotion. It would serve the very useful purpose of keeping dirt, grit and grass from finding it's way into the delicate mechanisms though. A robot made for use outside may well include some form of skin, if only in the form of a flexible bag enclosing each joint.